Susan Nesbit

How an Entry-Level, Interdisciplinary Sustainability Course Revealed the Benefits and Challenges of a University-Wide Initiative for Sustainability Education.

Purpose – Delivery of sustainability-related curriculum to undergraduate students can be problematic due to the traditional “siloing” of curriculum by faculties along disciplinary lines. In addition, while there is often a ready availability of courses focused on sustainability issues in the later years of students’ programs, few early entry-level courses focused on sustainability, broad enough to apply to all disciplines, are available to students in the first year of their program. Design/methodology/approach – In this paper, we describe the development, and preliminary implementation, of an entry-level, interdisciplinary sustainability course. To do so, the authors describe the development of a university-wide initiative designed to bridge units on campus working and teaching in sustainability areas, and to promote and support sustainability curriculum development. Findings – The authors describe the conceptual framework for organising course content and delivery. The authors conclude with an informal ...

Dissolving Dualisms: How Two Positivists Engaged With Non-Positivist Qualitative Methodology

This is the story of how a chemical engineer and a medical microbiologist overcame their positivist training and deeply held disciplinary attitudes to engage with non-positivist qualitative methodology. Through a series of facilitated reflections they explored what helped and hindered their transition from positivist to non-positivist inquiry. To move forward they needed to acknowledge the extent and nature of the transition they were making, find metaphors to dissolve troubling dualisms, and balance a desire to reach out to others with the need to manage the very real sense of vulnerability that came with embracing subjectivity. Their experiences suggest that pragmatism may be a useful bridging framework for the growing number of academics from the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) disciplines turning to qualitative methodologists for help to move beyond positivist research.

Embedding Sustainability Principles into Engineering Education

Because sustainability learning is necessarily situated in local culture and “place,” engaging key communities-of-interest in planning and deployment is foundational to sustainability effort. Recently, the University Sustainability Initiative (USI), at the University of British Columbia (UBC), employed engagement techniques that reached out across the university campus to develop generic descriptions of sustainability attributes of graduating students, which propose that UBC students within all disciplines strive to develop four attributes in preparation for facing today’s challenges (i.e., holism, sustainability knowledge, awareness & integration, and acting for positive change) (USI 2015a). The USI recognizes, “that in order to find creative solutions to the ecological, economic and social challenges of our time, we must explore, advance and apply our understanding of sustainability” (USI 2015b). This paper reports on a second set of engagement processes focused on developing the first stage of Engineering Education for Sustainable Development (EESD) degree-level learning outcomes that, in turn, aim to guide course redevelopment within the engineering programs. We start by presenting examples of sustainability learning opportunities offered in undergraduate programs elsewhere in North America. Most of these opportunities involve adding several courses to an already course-heavy degree. At several schools there is an option to complete a “certificate program” encompassing a few extra courses, but these certificate programs are not necessarily directed at engineering students. We then describe UBC Applied Science Faculty engagement activities, aimed at measuring the interest of administrators, faculty members, staff, and students regarding incorporating sustainability learning opportunities within the common first year curriculum. We next relate informal first year student survey responses to the literature and we outline recommendations for advancing the development of sustainability learning within the first year curriculum.

Engaging alumni in EESD curriculum assessment

With the goal of continually improving the civil engineering undergraduate program at the University of British Columbia (UBC), the current, 2-phased, study assesses the level of graduating student achievement of two critical Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board (CEAB) graduating student attributes, namely “ethics” and “the impact of engineering on society and the environment”. The first phase, which is reported here, involves deploying, at a small scale, a novel process of assessing the ethics attribute. The base-line data collected include both the self-evaluation by a small set of 4 year students respecting their development of the ethics attribute, and the assessment by a practicing engineers alumni panel of the level at which the students meet entry-level engineering ethics expectations. In addition to assessing student achievement of the ethics attribute, the alumni panel discussed possible refinements of the novel assessment process. The second phase of the study, to be reported in a subsequent paper, involves a larger-scale deployment of the revised protocol in order to assess the CEAB “impacts of engineering on society and the environment” attribute. The objective of this study is to gain insights into possible gaps between lived curriculum and industry expectations by employing an authentic, and administratively manageable, assessment protocol.